A team from Imperial College London’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has devised a technique which collects fingerprints along with their chemical residue and keeps them intact for future reference.
It was found that the use of gel tapes, commercial gelatine based tape, provided a simple method for collection and transportation of prints for chemical imaging analysis. The prints, once lifted, were analysed in a spectroscopic microscope. The sample is irradiated with infrared rays to identify individual molecules within the print to give a detailed chemical composition. The information is then processed by an infrared array detector which chemically maps the residue. This process builds up a chemical photograph which allows for the most comprehensive information obtained from a fingerprint.
Details of the research were recently published in the August edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry.
I guess we will be seeing this soon on CSI!
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